Friday, July 12, 2013

eRoadRacing season opens, practice round results in Valencia

Zongshen

The eRoadRacing 2013 season is now underway with an event in Valencia Spain. I've been seeing postings on Facebook about the practice round today, and the eRoadRacing organizers have now sent out a press release. It says Zongshen, Agni Racing and Renegade Z are racing, which means a conspicuous absence of Muench a long-time stalwart of the European TTXGP and e-Power.

All the teams ran 11 laps during practice, with Zongshen pulling the fastest laps.

Riding for Agni is Sam West, who, while he's an experienced motorcycle racer, is a rookie to electric bikes. He said: ‘Practice went really well. We had a bit of an issue with the amount of power the bike was giving at the start but we made a couple of changes, went back out and I started to get the hang of running without any gears and without an engine! The bike is fantastic. It is great to hear it running without any noise and to get such a pure riding experience. You can really hear what the tyres are doing, what the chassis is doing and you get lots of feedback from the breaks, which you wouldn’t normally get. It was a bit unusual to have no engine breaking. There was a bit of locking up and a bit of backing it into the turns while I got used to that but it was a fantastic experience. We are making a few changes to the suspension for tomorrow to get it how I like it. We are also going to ramp up the power and hopefully go a bit quicker.'

Zongshen’s team manager Daniel Chung said: ‘Practice went okay but the temperature on the machine is a little high. We will try and get more wind into the system to help it cool down. This year we increased the batteries’ capacity and the AC motor is reacting really well, so we are happy about that. We should be okay for qualifying; we just want to see what speed we can get with the new batteries now.’

The first qualifying race is at 11:30 AM local time (GMT+1) and the second is at 4pm. The schedule is for two races, the first being a four-lap sprint race at Noon on Sunday, and the second an eight lap race beginning at 4pm.

From their press release it's unclear what the actual results are, and how many bikes are present in total. In the past Zongshen and Agni have both had multiple bikes, but perhaps this time they only have one apiece, and perhaps there are only 3 bikes present in total.